Mission

CUCo’s mission is to support a diverse group of early- and mid-career academics to come together and be well equipped with resources and capacities for working in unusual transdisciplinary collaborations to address the most pressing challenges of the age.

Aim

CUCo’s aim is to bring together and support early- and mid-career academics in unusual inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations, serving as a breeding ground for breakthrough research that addresses pressing challenges of the age.

Vision

CUCo strives to nourish passion-fueled research, where scholars can find joy and grow as researchers and as humans. CUCo honours progress over perfection, process over outcome, eco over ego, and doing business as unusual. CUCo is committed to fostering brave spaces that enable scholars to challenge the productivity-driven, competition-based, path-dependent individualism that has come to dominate academia. These take the form of collaborative, non-hierarchical, open, fair and inclusive approaches to inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge co-generation that are currently undervalued and under-supported in conventional academic frameworks.

CUCo’s values are:

• Explorativity: Expanding curiosity about and appreciation for the perspectives, experiences and approaches of others;
• Non-conformity: Believing that more humane and equitable forms of collaboration are possible and striving to stay true to those ideals, despite any institutional and cultural barriers;
• Co-nurturance: Engaging in communication and collaborative co-learning practices that focus on building up instead of breaking down and listening to many instead of the shouting few;
• Creativity: Embracing diverse ways of knowing both in becoming attuned to phenomena and in the design and development of research processes and outputs;
• Humility: Deepening humility and reflexivity by recognising the limits of scholarly traditions, perspectives and skills; 
• Trust: Daring to be vulnerable together, by sensing, experimenting, learning from failure, and staying with the trouble.

To advance these values, CUCo focuses on four concrete fields:

• Supporting research that brings together early and mid-career scholars with diverse profiles seeking to transcend disciplinary boundaries so as to contribute to addressing pressing challenges, in humane collaborations; 
• Gathering and documenting knowledge on the process of inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration to advance the body of knowledge and the accessibility of that knowledge to current and future research teams;
• Facilitating and strengthening learning processes that enhance tentacular thinking and doing – drawing on multiple senses and modes of communication to creatively engage with complex realities – among scholars from diverse backgrounds; 
• Advocating for institutional structures that recognise and reward more nurturing, inclusive, transparent and sustainable ways for scholars to learn from and collaborate with one another, as part of an international ecosystem of like-minded initiatives.

Read more about CUCo’s mission and vision in the 2024-2027 roadmap.